Peter Mandelson, a former European commissioner for trade, has joined the New York-based investment bank Lazard as a senior adviser. The bank said the former commissioner and former UK business secretary would provide “independent strategic counsel” to Lazard and its customers.

Mandelson said he was looking forward to travelling between the bank’s many offices “supporting trade and investment opportunities across the globe”.

He is joining a varied bunch of advisers to Lazard which already includes Paul Keating, a former Labour prime minister of Australia, and Archie Norman, a sometime deputy chairman of the UK’s Conservative Party.

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the former European commissioner for external relations and neighbourhood policy, has also announced that she has secured another directorship. She will join the supervisory board of Alpine Holding, an Austrian construction company owned by the Spanish firm Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (FCC). The company is counting on Ferrero-Waldner’s contacts to expand its business in central Europe.

The Austrian ex-commissioner already sits on the supervisory board of Munich Re, a reinsurance company, and is a member of the advisory board of the architectural company run by Norman Foster.